On a sunny morning, drinking black coffee on his deck just outside of the city limits, Scott Schiffner watches as his daughters play in the barn.

It’s a quiet moment, a rare one, and it’s easy to see that between riding bulls, staying in hotels, and driving through the night to do it all over, quiet moments don’t happen very often.

But, it’s the life Schiffner has lived for most of his life and, professionally, for 15 years; the one his pregnant wife Brandy supports, the only one five-year-old Maysa and three-year-old Hadley know.

When it’s going to come to an end, he’s simply not sure anymore.

“Everybody asks me,” the 33-year-old Stettler native was saying, with a sigh. “Every interview I do, they say, ‘How much longer do you have left? How much longer are you going to be riding bulls? You’re getting older.’ In bull-riding, it’s always, ‘When are you going to retire?’

“I’m at the point where, if you’re still winning, you’re still enjoying it, you’re not embarrassing yourself, you should keep going. But that’s the million dollar question.”

In a sport where one’s payday is determined in eight seconds or less, the window of being on top and staying there seems even shorter. When you get there, retirement questions start almost immediately and, when getting stomped on or kicked by a 2,000-pound bull is a regular work hazard, injuries take a toll.

Then, there’s that whole theory of getting smarter as you get older …

“I might have next year,” says Schiffner, who turned pro in 1998 and getting set for Pool A competition at the 2013 Calgary Stampede. “I might not. And I’ve said this a few times, too … I love riding bulls now, probably more than I ever have. I just don’t like leaving home. It’s harder and harder for me to get in the vehicle from off this deck with my kids and that. But I do know that I love riding bulls more than I ever have. So …”

So, he makes it work.

These days, Schiffner stays close to home and only enters rodeos in Canada so his family can watch. When he does travel, he hooks up with dedicated family men and fellow riders Jesse Torkelson and Beau Hill, and tries to surround himself with riders that are better than him. They attend anywhere from 50 to 60 rodeos, boarding 100 to 150 bulls a year, which seems like a lot but it’s not compared with 120 to 140 rodeos (and 200 to 250 bulls) when he was pushing hard to qualify for the National Finals rodeo only a few years ago.

Technically, not much has changed for Schiffner. Mentally, though, he’s never been sharper.

“Ninety-per cent of us deserve to be there and no one can ride better than the other one,” he said. “It’s who can be mentally stable through the ups and downs. I don’t ride, really, better than anybody else in Canada. But I can mentally handle winning, losing, and everything that goes with it. Sometimes, you’d look at me and go, ‘I’m not handling it very well,’ but I get through. I’ve watched guys with way more talent than me in their little finger than I do in my entire body — but they can’t deal with the ups and downs of rodeo.

His career has been filled with errors at the 7.9-second mark and he can recall being bucked off eleven consecutive bulls. He broke his femur on his right leg; then broke his other leg which shot his chances at making the National Finals Rodeo. Meltdowns (“where I lose all composure of my life for about 10 minutes,” he says, chuckling). A sore shoulder. Sore back. Sore ribs. Sore everything.

Yet he dusts himself off and climbs back on.

“Scott always pushes the envelope,” his wife Brandy says. “He always has. There’s not a lot that do. He doesn’t ever really give up and say, ‘Oh, I’m sore and feel crappy.’ He gets his ice out or his ibuprofen and tapes himself back together … I don’t know if quitting ever goes through his mind. He’s definitely never come home and said it.”

Through age, too, comes a new level of appreciation for the sport and his ability to still compete the way he does.

After winning his first Canadian title at age 21, he waited eleven years before finally capturing another — the 2012 crown at the CFR in Edmonton. On top of it, Schiffner, a former Guy Weadick Memorial award winner, was voted as the 2012 Cowboy of the Year --- an honour, he said, that hit home for him.

Which, in essence, says it all about his evolution as a bull rider.

“I’ve got some buckles in there I won in the late ’90s, early 2000s,” Schiffner was saying. “When I won ’em, I looked at ‘em and went, ‘Geez, these rodeo committees really cheeped out and put an ugly buckle on them.’ Now, 10, 15 years later, I look at ‘em and think they’re cool. Because now I’ve become a little bit more appreciative of what it takes to win. For there to be 11 years between Canadian titles … I thought they were just going to hand them to me, year-after-year.

“You realize it’s not just as easy as you think it is when you’re a kid.”

Schiffner qualified for his first Calgary Stampede in 1999 and has been to the final-four twice in his career, winning the $50,000 showdown once in 2001 which, in his eyes, turned what people perceived as “his dream” into his reality.

“When I chose rodeo, I chose that I was going to make a living out of it,” he said. “When I was younger, people I grew up with or my parents’ friends, they’d laugh and say, ‘What else are you doing for a job?’ And, I’d say, ‘Well, that IS my job.’ They wouldn’t believe me and roll their eyes at me.

“There were times where I was $5,000 or $10,000 deep on a credit card. But I insisted I could do it.”

So, with a year like last year that saw him win the aggregate average at Ponoka and the 2012 Canadian championship, riding off into the sunset (so to speak) would understandably be harder to imagine.

Or maybe that’s the perfect way to finish his brilliant career off. Or maybe, Schiffner figures, it’ll hit him on a quiet day at home and he won’t want to leave. Or not.

But he still loves what he does.

“There’s no big plan of what I’m doing next year, or this year … I don’t know,” Schiffner says. “I think I love bull riding more now because — for that reason — I understand the game better now. I don’t know if I’m better at it but I definitely understand it. I just started looking at it from a different point of view. At my age, it’s challenging. It is. I have to work harder at it. The travelling is harder for me …

“But there’s nothing better.”

kodland@calgaryherald.comFollow on Twitter/KristenOdlandCH

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